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Amazon's Best Computer Books of 2004
theodp writes "Amazon.com's Editors have announced their selections for the Best Books of 2004 in the Computers and Internet category. Their favorite book of the year? Excel Hacks, which edged out Head First Servlets & JSP (#3), a Grand Theft Auto Strategy Guide (#5) and The Data Warehouse ETL Toolkit (#8). Can Slashdot readers offer some more inspired choices?"
Expert One-on-One J2EE Development without EJB by Rod Johnson, Juergen Hoeller.
This is an excellent book with great advice about many aspects of software development. As the title suggests, it describes how EJB is not necessary for most J2EE projects, and offers alternative solutions to many of the problems EJB's solve. It does center around the Spring framework, as the authors are the creators of that framework, but it does give other technologies a fair chance.
I've personally found the strategies and technologies discussed in this book to be very useful. My new projects are developed in a manner largely based on this book and they've been pretty successful so far.
[Amazon's splurb on Excel Hacks...] "The spreadsheet is the software tool that turns everyone into a hacker" Whoda thunk it. Microsoft Excel provides the true path to hacker enlightenment. Amazon said!
I read
IMHO
The early bird may get the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese!
My point was that these kinds of books are increasing significantly in popularity, and they're going beyond simple "intro to technology" type books. I expect that at some point "programming" books will be a small subset of the larger "computer book" category. Maybe they won't even be called "computer books" anymore.
EricSure, it's a silly statement, but Lotus 1-2-3 was the playground in which I (and a lot of other people) did much of my early hacking. Kids of the Excel generation may not be familiar with all the hacks that surrounded 1-2-3, including copy-protection-defeating tricks, add-ins for using it as a word processor (4-Word) or a mathematical solution seeker or a DOS WYSIWYG publishing tool (Allways), data compression to fit big files on little disks with SQZ!, using its primitive macro capability (including the powerful /x commands) as a Turing-complete procedural programming language capable of self-modifying code. It was a tool that was both accessible to mundanes and provided a wealth of phun for the rest of us.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
"Write Great Code: Understanding the Machine"
Unbelievably interesting book. the premise being that the current generation of coders is among the first who were not *required* to learn Assembly Language, thus do not truly understand what is going on under the hood. Because of this, they are unable to create "great" code in high-level languages because they simply don't understand the inherent costs of various routines.
One of the secondary premises focuses on the fact that, while hardware power is advancing at Moore's Law pace, software is requiring more power at nearly the same rate, many times for no reason other than the developer(s) not knowing how to write truly efficient code.
"All that glitters is not gold"